ARTIFICIAL HELLS

notes to pages 113– 7
advertisements were broadcast on Channel 11, using an announcer to say
that ‘This medium announces the appearance of a poster the text of which
we are now projecting.’ The text of the posters then appeared on screen,
albeit in a different font.
33 The ‘missed encounter’ is a key theme of Lacan’s eleventh Seminar, The
Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964– 5 (London: Vintage,
1998). However, the Lacanian missed encounter should be understood as
a missed encounter with the ‘real’, understood as traumatic and inaccessible
to consciousness. The excessive presence of the real can only be
signified negatively, as absence.
34 Discontinuity is a recurrent theme in Argentine conceptualism of the
1960s: see Masotta’s essay ‘Los medios de informacíon de masas y la categoría
de “discontinuo” en la estética contemporánea’ (‘The Mass
Information Media and the Category of “Discontinuity” in the Contemporary
Aesthetic’), in Masotta, Revolución en el arte (Buenos Aires:
Edición Edhasa, 2004), which takes its lead from Barthes’ essay ‘Literature
and Discontinuity’ (1962). See also Andrea Giunta, ‘An Aesthetic of
Discontinuity’, in Oscar Bony: El Mago, Obras 1965– 2001, Buenos Aires:
MALBA, 2007, pp. 269– 74; and Daniel Quiles, Between Code and Message:
Argentine Conceptual Art 1966– 1976, PhD Dissertation, Graduate Center,
City University of New York, 2010.
35 Masotta, ‘After Pop, We Dematerialise’ (1967), in LHN, p. 213.
36 The annual exhibition ‘Experiencias’ replaced the Premio Di Tella in
1967, 1968 and 1969. I have chosen not to translate ‘Experiencias’ since in
Spanish this connotes both experience and experiment.
37 Email to the author from Roberto Jacoby, 17 January 2006.
38 Invited to restage this work for the 7th Havana Biennial in 2000, Bony
proposed La Familia Cubana: an authentic Cuban family who would be
present for the duration of the exhibition, and able to talk to visitors. He
eventually withdrew from the exhibition after the Cuban government
insisted that it would select the family to be on display.
39 In recent restagings of this work, the mother has required payment as
well as the father.
40 Jorge Romero Brest, ‘Experiencias 68’, in LHN, p. 130.
41 Horacio Verbitsky, Arte y Politica, cited in Instituto Di Tella Experiencias
68, p. 78.
42 Lind: ‘I thought it would be fun to see human beings in this context
instead of objects.’ (Cited in a letter to the author from Cecilia Widenheim,
Curator at Moderna Museet, 23 January 2006.)
43 The work was restaged by the Wrong Gallery for Frieze Art Fair in 2006.
44 De Dominicis, quoted in Adrian Searle, ‘How Much for the Invisible
Sculpture?’, Guardian, 12 October 2006.
45 The press reacted to the piece with predictable outcry, but the scandalised
headlines (‘Un povero minorato “esposato” alla biennale d’arte di Venezia’,
316